Nonfiction / Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach
:: Animal or Winter Solstice ::
There is something moving inside our walls. Something trying to get out or work its way in deeper.
Something animal. Alive. I heard it first as scratching in the middle of the night, a sound soft
enough, it could have been my husband, moving his calloused big toe against the sheets or the dog,
twitching in her sleep, her long nails grazing the hardwood, or my son, clawing at the shelf beside his
bed with nails chewed down to skin. The next night, again peeing in the dark after again being
woken by my child screaming out for me, I thought it could have been the toilet tank, something
loose, unhinged perhaps, the way parts of me are slowly coming undone with each sleepless night.
My child’s screams lodged between the cartridges of my neck and ear so every turn of the head
creeks or pops, quiet, but noticeable if you are close. But the night before longest night of the year,
I swear I heard teeth. And an unsteady rhythm, like a woodpecker unable to keep time against the
bark. But this is no bird. This, inside our walls, is wingless and angry. The sound got closer and
louder, chewing, grating, incessant. I pressed my palm to the wall and nearly thought I felt it. Its
longing to be anywhere else. I banged with the heal of my hand, so loud and hard the shampoo fell
down to the shower tile. For a moment, it silenced. I kept my palm on the wall, willing it to stay that
way. Quiet. My child was still asleep. I knew I didn’t have long before he’d be awake again. The
gnawing and scraping returned. Parenthood, a repetition to a point beyond singularity. We tuck
and kiss and hug and calm and hold until everything feels like one long night, indiscernible from another.
Even touch, so repeated it becomes almost unfelt. Almost. I thought I saw a crack begin to form in
the drywall, but I have terrible eyesight. I trust my hands more, and the wall felt cold, smooth,
unruptured. Today, the sun will appear to stand still at its lowest point. I will listen for the moment
it sinks below the horizon. It will be like a slow, steady drip from the faucet. So soft and consistent,
we don’t hear it after a while. I’m sure we will get used to the animal too. It will find a way out or
burrow so deep we forget it was ever there. But I know its body’s longing. The teeth and nails will
persist, eating, moving, devouring the house while we sleep. I know it’s not its fault. Impulse.
Repetition. Animal. How can I blame it for its nature of need unbound by want. Tomorrow,
the night will be a glimmer shorter. We won’t feel this difference. My son will still wake screaming.
Mama! a sound more animal than love. Mama! a hunger. He will refuse anyone else’s hands or words.
He will demand more light and touch, no matter how bright or long each last. He will demand
proximity. The earth closer to the sun. His body close to mine. My palm on the wall close to the
trace of an animal. He will lose his breath and hide under the blankets on the floor at the foot of our
bed. Close your eyes, my love, find your way towards sleep and you won’t hear terror tearing up the
walls.
From the writer
:: Account ::
While I had written mostly poetry, when I had to teach a creative nonfiction course, I began to write alongside my students, reading voraciously and trying to learn the form of the lyric essay as I was teaching it. So, for the last few years, I have been working on what I now realize are linked lyric essays that deal with parenting a neurodiverse child with ADHD and autism spectrum disorder. I often found myself writing the same moment, event, or story, in both poetry and prose, trying to figure out which genre and form was the better fit. With “Animal or Winter Solstice,” I felt myself enter a hybrid space that found a union between poem and essay. The prose blocks allow me to linger and meditate on something longer, and with a more narrative progression, than I might in a lineated lyric, but the indentations, poetry-like, felt necessary for the movement of the piece, the static progression of time. This was the first lyric essay I wrote where within me, and on the page, the genres weren’t fighting against each other, but rather coming together to create something new. This was the first piece I did not feel the need to write as both prose and poetry, because it had found a way of being both. Tell Me it Gets Easier, the larger book project this piece comes from, is an unfiltered account of taking care of the many bodies depending on mine, while continuing to take care of my own through the act of writing. In other essays from this project, the struggles with parenting overlap with processing the war in my birthplace, Ukraine, as my now seven-year-old expresses his own fascination with death, violence, and the grotesque. In the essays, I am reaching towards understanding him as much as I am trying to understand myself, and what it means to be his mother.
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach (www.juliakolchinskydasbach.com) emigrated from Dnipro, Ukraine as a Jewish refugee in 1993, when she was six years old. She is the author of three poetry collections: 40 Weeks (YesYes Books, 2023), Don’t Touch the Bones, and The Many Names for Mother, winner of the Wick Poetry Prize (Kent State University Press, 2019) and finalist for the Jewish Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, and American Poetry Review, among others. Her recent awards include the American Literary Review Poetry Prize and a Sustainable Arts Foundation Grant. She is the author of the model poem for “Dear Ukraine”: A Global Community Poem https://dearukrainepoem.com/. She is currently working on a new poetry collection as well as a book of linked lyric essays which grapples with raising a neurodiverse child with a disabled partner under the shadow of the war against Ukraine, Julia’s birthplace. She is Assistant Professor of English at Denison University and lives with her family in Columbus, Ohio